By Nasir Wasim
“One of the biggest misconceptions about A.I. is that there is a super intelligent being that can do all, know all and is smarter than all of us put together. This is the biggest misconceptions about Artificial Intelligence. A.I. is built on us. A.I. is mimicking our thought process. A.I. is basically an emulation of us.”
-Dr. Ayanna Howard (Roboticist) (currently serving as the Dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University.
Most individuals, when thinking about the ability of human intelligence versus artificial intelligence, would try to think about the ability of a human brain vs a computer processor. Though there is no true comparison possible between a computer and the human brain (which I will get to at the end of this article), here are some real statistics to demonstrate just how much the difference is.
Speed: A part of the human brain is responsible for keeping us alive. Functions like breathing, sight, smell, touch, taste, memory, digestion, excretion, reproduction, pain recognition, muscle repair and many more keep happening without the human being consciously making a decision to do so. As opposed to a processor (considered the brain of the computer) which has a very specific function. Processing Information.
But neurologists have been chipping at trying to answer this question since the dawn of the 20th century. The closest estimation by the community of such neurologists believe that the human brain can perform 38 thousand trillion operations per second while the most powerful computer in the world called the Blue Gene can manage only .002% of that.
Storage (Memory):
The easy one here is that the largest storage in a computer is at IBM’s Almaden California research lab. 120 petabytes or 120 million gigabytes.
The human brain is a bit complicated in this sense. Over the long term, memories are encoded in neural patterns – circuits of connected neurons. And your brain’s ability to knit together new patterns is limitless, so theoretically the number of memories stored in those patterns is limitless as well. Theoretically, your storage capacity for long-term memories is endless.
Creativity:
This is the “area of expertise” considered by human where Artificial Intelligence fails. A computer has yet to have created an original symphony, written an original script, told an original joke, or recognized an original need in business.
Which leads to the point that A.I. is a tool for humanity to progress. Consider a wrench, a hammer, a printer, a scanner, an IR receiver. A much more sophisticated tool but in the end just a tool.
